LiDestri's Offerings

What Can a Great Co-Packing Partner Offer Your Company?

All contract manufacturers are not created equal. LiDestri offers a broad range of services to meet your needs:

Private Label Expertise
In today's hyper-competitive, food, beverage, wine and spirits environment, it’s not enough for retailers to follow and imitate national brand peers. Through our Innovation Center, we help some of the most respected market retailers create products their customers cannot find anywhere else.

Contract Manufacturing for CPG Companies
LiDestri makes consumer-beloved product lines for many of the best-known, national brands. With precise production available coast to coast, our team makes sure the same high-quality products go out with speed and consistency.

Relevant Experience
A crucial step in the selection process should be to match the co-pack partner’s experience with the product you're trying to make, gauging expertise in specific processes and packaging offerings. LiDestri's team is expert in aseptic, retort, HPP and other forward-leaning food and beverage processing capabilities that match modern market trends. The LiDestri Spirits team has been wildly successful in cultivating relationships with 9 of the 10 largest spirits companies in the country as well as celebrity and emerging brands such as Kenny Chesney’s Blue Chair Bay. LiDestri's core competencies are built on decades of experience in sauces, salsas and dips and in cooking products that help home chefs, such as basting and simmer sauces, cooking wines and oils. As an innovative, entrepreneurial and can-do company, LiDestri is willing to try new things for the right partner, and we look to expand our scope when there’s a convincing business case.

Collaboration
Any good contract manufacturer should be able to follow a recipe, but creative and collaborative co-packing partners offer far more. As LiDestri does every day in its Innovation Center, the right co-packing partner can help an entrepreneur define, formulate, refine and commercialize products and packaging in a process that's not only collaborative but also fun! To help one customer achieve differentiation, we sourced an unusual tomato varietal for Newman's Own Common Good organic pasta sauce. We do our best to help our customers succeed and to be highly satisfied and genuinely delighted in our outstanding service.

Supplier Relationships
Every co-packer leans heavily on its suppliers, whether they provide raw or processed ingredients; bottles, cartons and caps; boxes and labels; and almost everything else that goes into quickly and efficiently making many of the highest quality products on the market. We are great customers to our suppliers: We value our relationships with our suppliers as dearly as any. We meet our financial obligations, we're easy to work with and flexible whenever we can be. Without a doubt, the relationships we’ve built over 40 years are to the benefit of our customers. When supplies get low, the "above and beyond" treatment we’ve earned keeps our lines running on schedule and our customers' production more insulated from disruption.

Ingredient Sourcing
Finding the highest quality ingredients that are consistently available at affordable prices is the lifeblood for any co-packer. At the same time, staying on the cutting edge of flavor trends is an important consideration in the hyper-competitive food and beverage business. As with other relationships we’ve built, our connections with flavor houses on the beverage and spirits side and ingredient houses on the food side help LiDestri to be on the forefront of trends before they emerge, which helps our customers be first to market with differentiated offerings. Whether the ingredients are organic, non-GMO or otherwise hard-to-source, our customers consistently tell us they’re impressed with how we find a way to get them.

Test Kitchen
Expect your contract manufacturer to offer some type of stovetop, sometimes called benchtop, test kitchen where initial formulations are created. The LiDestri kitchens are second to none in this regard, but for us, the test kitchen is just one step in a more comprehensive three-step process to make sure formulations hit the right notes and can be scaled up without losing their appeal.

Tasting Panel
It’s far less common for contract manufacturers and co-packers to have a panel of certified tasters onsite, as LiDestri does. Our team’s educated palates help our customers fine-tune their flavor profiles in food, beverage, and spirits at the Innovation Center.

Pilot Room
One of the rarest and most valuable features at LiDestri’s Innovation Center is the Pilot Room. Where many co-packers take a product from stovetop testing directly to full-scale runs, we offer an intermediate step. The Pilot Room allows us to mimic the processing and packaging conditions a product faces in full-scale production but on a much smaller scale. This gives our customers small batches of products they can use for consumer testing, allowing them to fine-tune products before they begin appearing on shelves.

Bottling
Contract manufacturing and co-packing for spirits and beverage are growing divisions at LiDestri, particularly as consumers demand healthy and natural beverages. We offer hot and cold fill aseptic bottling in multiple locations and recently founded Finger Lakes Fresh Press™, a high pressure processing (HPP) facility that makes it possible to process bottled beverages with water pressure rather than heat. This process retains natural flavors and vitamins that would be lost with traditional pasteurization techniques and substantially extends product shelf-life.

Regulatory Review
LiDestri adds tremendous value and peace of mind for our customer partners by conducting comprehensive regulatory reviews to ensure product labels are accurate and meet federal guidelines. Given the heightened consumer scrutiny on labels and the changing nature of product claim guidelines, our customers tell us they are happy to rely on our expertise.